Teraphim Are the Elemental Spirits of Ancient Divination

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 13 pages

Thirteen pages on the teraphim — the household images of the Hebrew scriptures, whose function the biblical text never quite explains — read here as instruments of divination operating through the spirits of the elements. The comparative case is built first: the priest-hierophant of the Egyptian temples wore a breast-plate of precious stones in every way similar to that of the high priest of the Israelites, which the study takes as evidence of a shared and older technique rather than of borrowing in either direction.

The most quoted image follows: the tabernacle described as simply the archaic telephone of those days of magic, when occult powers were acquired by initiation, as the study insists they still are. On the spirits themselves Blavatsky is careful in a way that matters for this series — ancient divination was always accomplished with their help, but there are good as well as bad among them, beneficent and malevolent gods in every age, so that the practice is neither black nor white until a practitioner makes it one. The closing section turns polemical on the subject of who and what is still being worshipped.

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